Barnes & Noble

The Wild Bunch may be Sam Peckinpah's all-around greatest film, but this looser, moodier elegy to the dying frontier is his most poetic. The film employs an emblematic Old West storyline: Outlaw-turned-sheriff Pat Garrett (James Coburn) must hunt down and capture his old partner in crime, the legendary Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). Bob Dylan supplied the haunting soundtrack, and his songs work with Peckinpah's starkly beautiful images of the Mexican landscape -- all harsh sunlight filtered through desert dust -- to create an atmosphere that lingers long after the movie ends. Like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, also made in the early 1970s, Pat Garret is as much a lament for the passing of the '60s counterculture as it is for the Old West. The outlaw Billy represents youth and freedom from the Establishment: In the film's romanticized worldview, maturity equals imprisonment and/or death. As Billy, the handsome, slightly puffy Kristofferson is the film's weak link; still making the transition, at that point, from folk singer to screen actor, he lacks the edginess to convincingly embody such an icon. But Coburn, the lean and silver-haired Western veteran, is superb, projecting an aura of melancholy and regret that infuses the entire film. The onscreen presense of Dylan, playing an elfin, enigmatic character called Alias, is nothing more than set dressing, but his songs supply an omniscient voice that articulates emotions and ideas that the taciturn characters can't. The film's most moving passage is the wordless scene in which a sheriff, played by Slim Pickens, expires on the banks of a river to the hymnlike strains of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" as High Noon's Katy Jurado watches in tears. The last of Peckinpah's westerns, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was his poignant and lyrical farewell to the genre he helped revise Kryssa Schemmerling

All Movie Guide

A former friend betrays a legendary outlaw in Sam Peckinpah's final Western. Holed up in Fort Sumner with his gang between cattle rustlings, Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) ignores the advice of comrade-turned-lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) to escape to Mexico, and he winds up in jail in Lincoln, New Mexico. After Billy theatrically escapes, inspiring enigmatic Lincoln resident Alias (Bob Dylan) to join him, the governor (Jason Robards Jr.) and cattle baron Chisum (Barry Sullivan) requisition Garrett to form a posse and hunt him down. Rather than flee to Mexico when he can, Billy heads back to Fort Sumner, meeting his final destiny at the hands of his friend Pat, who, two decades later, is forced to face the consequences of his own Faustian pact with progress. With a script by Rudolph Wurlitzer, Peckinpah uses the historical basis of Billy's death to eulogize the West dreamily yet violently as it is desecrated by corrupt capitalists. Both Pat and Billy know that their time is passing, as surely as Garrett's posse knows that they are participating in a legend. Using familiar Western players like Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado, Peckinpah underscores the West's existence as a media myth, and he even appears himself as a coffin maker. Just as the bloodletting of Peckinpah's earlier The Wild Bunch (1969) invoked the Vietnam War, the casting of Kristofferson and Dylan alluded to the chaotic late '60s/early '70s present; the counterculture has little place in a corporate future. Also like The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett was truncated by its studio; the cuts did nothing to help its box office. Key scenes, particularly the framing story of Garrett's fate, have since been restored to the home-video version. In this director's cut, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid stands as one of Peckinpah's most beautiful and complex films, killing the Western myth even as he salutes it. Lucia Bozzola

Product Details

• UPC: 027616156730
• Source: MGM (WARNER)
• Time: 1:46:00

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection